Apple and Meta, whose executives have spent years trading barbs about privacy and the future of computing, are joining forces to bring one of America’s most powerful open AI models to Apple’s high-end Macs.
Why it’s important: The collaboration marks a striking détente between two longtime Silicon Valley rivals, underscoring how the race for AI is reshaping relationships within the tech industry.
- The companies still compete on devices and the next generation of computers, but both see opportunity in integrating powerful AI capabilities into personal computers.
“We’re excited that mom and dad are playing nice again,” Alexandr Wang, Meta’s head of AI, told Axios.
Driving the news: Meta is launching Muse Spark Open, a model similar to Muse Spark 1.3, which it says is the most powerful open weight AI model developed in the United States.
- Meta joins a host of Western AI companies that have launched powerful open systems that promise to lower AI costs, provide businesses with more control, and offer an alternative to China’s AI ecosystem.
- Nvidia released updated versions of its Nemotron family of models on Tuesday, and US-based Reflection AI and France-based Mistral both released new open source models last week.
- As proof of Muse Spark Open’s capabilities, Meta worked with Apple to run the model locally on two or four connected Mac Studios powered by Apple’s M5 Ultra chips, using Apple’s MLX framework.
Zoom: The prospect of a powerful model – with 816 billion parameters – running on Apple hardware offers a proof of concept for the extent to which companies will be able to build their own AI systems.
- This could give companies more alternatives to Nvidia GPUs and proprietary models from major AI labs, potentially changing some of the economics of AI.
- Meta’s template will be free to download, licensed for commercial use, and will also be available through cloud providers and developer tools.
What they say: Wang said the companies had been working together for several months, with Daniel Gross, a former Apple executive now at Meta, playing a key role in bringing the two sides together.
- “I think he played a very important role in getting the two companies to work together,” Wang said in a telephone interview.
Flashback: Apple Executive Chairman Tim Cook and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg have clashed repeatedly over privacy and their competing business models.
- In 2018, amid the Cambridge Analytica scandal on Facebook, Cook was asked what he would do if he were Zuckerberg. “I wouldn’t be in that situation,” Cook responded. Zuckerberg called Cook’s comments “extremely flippant.”
- The rivalry intensified in 2021, when Apple introduced new privacy protections that cut to the core of Facebook’s advertising business. Zuckerberg reportedly told employees that Facebook needed to “make” Apple suffer over the dispute, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The big picture: The race for AI is creating strange partners, blurring Silicon Valley’s long-standing rivalries and even bringing political adversaries closer together.
- Anthropic leases up to $15 billion a year of computing capacity from Elon Musk’s SpaceX, even though it competes with his AI company.
- Microsoft, a longtime OpenAI partner, is investing billions in rival Anthropic and integrating its Claude models into its own products.
- And in Washington, progressive Sen. Bernie Sanders and MAGA strategist Steve Bannon have found common ground in calling for stronger AI safeguards and challenging the power of Big Tech.
Between the lines: The Apple-Meta collaboration doesn’t mean the companies have resolved their differences, but it does suggest that those disagreements no longer prevent them from working together when their interests align.
- Meta benefits from the wide distribution of its AI models, while Apple can showcase the capabilities of its most powerful computers.
- And because the model runs locally, Meta doesn’t receive user prompts or other information, avoiding the privacy concerns that have long divided companies.
“Meta has no control or visibility into all of this,” Wang said of how developers use the model.
Yes, but: Making powerful AI models freely available raises concerns that malicious actors could remove protective measures and use the technology for cyberattacks or biological threats.
What we’re looking at: If the collaboration marks the start of a broader relationship between Apple and Meta.
- For now, Apple is helping demonstrate that Meta’s AI models can run locally on its computers. A bigger step would be for Apple to integrate Meta Models into Apple Intelligence, giving parent Facebook a role in operating Apple’s own AI features.
The bottom line: Wang acknowledged that Apple and Meta will continue to compete in some areas, but said that shouldn’t stop them from working together.
- “Where it makes sense to collaborate and partner, we want to be able to do that,” he said.
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